Live as if you were to die tomorrow

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Unknown (often misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi)

The meaning of the quote

On 12 January 2004, an 84-year-old man named Kimani Maruge walked into Kapkenduiywo Primary School in Eldoret, Kenya, and asked for a place in Standard One. The teachers doubted him at first, but he kept coming back until they let him sit with the 6- and 7-year-olds.

Maruge had fought for Kenya’s independence from British rule and had 30 grandchildren, 2 of them in the same school. He had never learned to read.

“I want to read the Holy Book for myself and find out.”

Kimani Maruge

By April he had passed his first exams with straight A’s in English, Kiswahili and

maths. A year later the school made him head boy.

Maruge lived both halves of the quote. At 84 he couldn’t afford to wait, yet he signed up for 8 years of primary school.

The advice is about 800 years old. Edmund of Abingdon, who taught at Oxford in the early 1200s, told his students to study as if they would live forever and live as if they would die tomorrow. Over the centuries the line was reworded and pinned on Gandhi. In the book The Good Boatman, his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi wrote that Gandhi held the same view.

Live now

If tomorrow were your last day, you wouldn’t save the hard conversation for a better moment or the big idea for “someday.” You’d do it now.

In 1904, Gandhi’s friend Henry Polak handed him a copy of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last at a Johannesburg station before the 24-hour train ride to Durban. Gandhi read it straight through and couldn’t sleep that night. By morning he had decided to change his life, and within a day he was planning the Phoenix Settlement, a farm where everyone shared the work and drew the same pay.

Learn forever

If you had endless time, no skill would be too slow to learn and no age too late to start. You’d begin the language or the degree today, even if it takes 10 years.

In 2008, violence after Kenya’s elections drove Maruge out of Eldoret and into a retirement home in Nairobi. He was 88, and soon after he enrolled again, this time in Standard 6 at Marura Primary School.

Action steps:

Which half are you missing?

Most of us lean toward one half. Some rush through their days and never learn anything new, and others keep studying and planning and never act. Start with the step for the half you skip.

1. Do what you’d regret leaving undone.
   Think of the call or the apology you’d make if tomorrow were your last day. Make it this week.
2. Start a skill you’d learn if you had 100 years.
   Give it 20 minutes a day and stop counting how long it will take to get good.

Maruge started school at 84 and went back to class at 88.

He couldn’t count on tomorrow, and he still learned as if he had forever.

About the author

In 1892, a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi stood up in a small Bombay court for his first case. He had to cross-examine a witness, and his mind went blank.

“I stood up, but my heart sank into my boots.”

Mahatma Gandhi

He sat down, told the agent to hire another lawyer and handed back his 30-rupee fee.

In 1893 he took a job in South Africa on a large trade case for a merchant named Dada Abdulla, and he learned the work by sitting alongside the best lawyers on it. That same year, railway officials threw him off a first-class carriage at Pietermaritzburg because he was Indian. The lawyer who froze in Bombay stayed 21 years and led Indians there in their fight for equal rights.

Gandhi wrote that as a student he read almost nothing outside his textbooks. He caught up later, and in jail he read Emerson, Ruskin and Mazzini.

Back in India in 1915, he led the fight for independence from British rule without violence. In 1930 he walked about 390 km (240 miles) to the sea to make his own salt and break a British salt tax. India became independent in 1947.

At 78 he was still risking his life for peace. In January 1948 he fasted for 5 days to stop riots in Delhi, and 12 days after he broke the fast he was shot dead on his way to evening prayers.

In 2004, 56 years after Gandhi’s death, Kimani Maruge, who had also fought British rule, sat down in a Standard One classroom in Kenya. You can read about Gandhi’s frozen moment in court and his sleepless night on the train in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

Resources

• The First Grader (Film)
• The World’s Oldest First-Grader Is Honored By A Google Doodle (Article)
• The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Book)
• Unto This Last (Book)
• How Ruskin’s Unto This Last inspired Mahatma Gandhi (Article)
• Edmund of Abingdon (Wikipedia)